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Patriot Box Office 1080p High-Definition Media Player PCMPBO25 (Black) |  | Brand: Patriot
Category: CE
List Price: $106.99
Buy New: $99.99
as of 9/9/2010 16:24 CDT details
You Save: $7.00 (7%)
Seller: Amazon.com
Rating:  62 reviews
Color: Black
Media: Electronics
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 1.5 x 5.7
MPN: PCMPBO25
Model: PCMPBO25
UPC: 879699009331
EAN: 0879699009331
ASIN: B002Q4U9PY
Shipping: Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Features:
| • | All anodized aluminum | | • | Full 1080p Media Play back | | • | Support 2.5-Inch HD | | • | Support H. 264 | | • | Support HDMI |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Supports full high-definition video playback up to 1080p Supports Dolby(R) Digital & DTS (TM) Surround Sound Expandable internal storage via 2.5" SATA SSD/HDD Supports video playback via UPnP network streaming Users can browse for shared videos, photos & music from networks, USB flash drives & USB external storage Supports many popular media formats such as H.264, ISO, VOB, DivX, xVid, MKV, MOV & MPEG
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 62
 An admirable effort, but needs MAJOR improvements September 9, 2010
buru buru piggu (New York, NY USA)
I was excited to try out this low-priced media tank because it uses the same Realtek chipset and OS that powers the very capable and inexpensive ASUS O!Play. What sets the Patriot Box Office (PBO) apart is the all-aluminum housing and 2.5" HDD bay, big selling points in my book. Neither of the major contenders in the home media player market offer these features. The Western Digital WD TV Live and both Asus models are plastic and lack internal HDD bays.
I own the WD TV Live and both variants of the O!Play. I rated all 3 devices very highly because of their versatility and ease of use. As stated above, the PBO is powered by the same guts that drive the O!Plays, which has proven itself as a solid technology platform, so how does it stack up against the O!Play?
I'm sad to say: not very well. I wanted to like the PBO because I really like the ASUS and the addition of HDD storage is ideal for copying over dozens of movies/shows so I can bring them to friends or relatives without having to lug along an external hard drive. Unfortunately, the PBO feels like a DIY player with a lot of rough edges. The interface is built on the same homely, boxy, no-frills DOS-looking OS as the O!Plays, but Patriot kicked it down a notch and made it worse. It is less responsive, more confusing, klunkier, and even less user-friendly.
For starters, the homepage of the device has a row of 3 icons on a spartan black background: COPY, BROWSER, and SETUP. For a home user, they're not going to care about COPY and BROWSER (which Patriot thinks is a verb, by the way). Contrast this with the O!Play, which has All Media, Movies, Photos, Music, On-Line Media, File Copy and Setup, arranged in a rotary configuration all on a bright blue swirly background with very big, easy-to-see icons. This is user-friendly and makes it easy for non-technical users. One level down from this, both devices display ugly black and white text menus, but this is where the PBO gets very very ugly. It shows an alphabet soup of abbreviations: USB, HDD, UPnP, NET, PLAYLIST. This is fine if you're a rather technical user, but not fine if you're an average person. The rest of the setup menus, file directory listings, and popup dialogs (e.g. for subtitles and media metadata like bitrate and current time) are functionally and visually the identical or very similar to the O!Plays. The PBO was definitely designed by programmers and this is the same criticism I have for the O!Play. All the extra layers of complexity and overly technical menus should be removed or streamlined so non-technical people can use this player.
Since the PBO uses the same chipset as the O!Play, I'll discuss several of the key features and annoyances instead. You can read more about the playback capabilities on the O!Play review page (Realtek chip'll play anything you throw at it). It also has all the same annoyances that the O!Play's OS has, including the mandatory network speed check every time you try to play a movie.
ME LIKE:
HDD installation was easy. Only took a few minutes to get the case off, slide the drive in and zip everything back up. 4 screws total. It saw the shared folders on my Mac and had no problems playing back the 720p MKV files, as expected. Unlike many products, this comes with a free HDMI cable.
I like the Go To function a lot. You can go to any time in the movie. But this comes with a trade-off. The ASUS lets you skip ahead/back in fixed increments of 1/5/10/etc mins (you choose one in the setup) by pushing left or right on the remote, which I frequently use. Oddly, the PBO does not have this feature. You can Fast Forward or Fast Rewind up to 32x (1.5x, 2x, 4x, 8x, 32x), but not skip ahead in increments.
Another handy feature is the subtitle location and size nudger. If the video has subtitles, Up/Down controls the location of the text. Left/Right controls the size. You can cycle through audio tracks with the AUDIO button, but not subtitles with the SUBTITLE button.
Like all players I've tested, the PBO remembers the last time you played a file and will offer to resume. This works even after you power off the device.
ME NO LIKE:
Where to begin?... I guess with the atrocious remote. It's a crowded mishmash of small, confusingly arranged buttons. By comparison, the ASUS remote which I also complained about, looks like a work of genius. All the buttons on the PBO remote are the same size (i.e. tiny), giving you no sense of hierarchy, importance, or spatial placement, making every use of the remote a frustrating experience. Without exaggeration, each button is about the size as a lentil (.20 to .25 inches across). The most commonly used buttons are scattered on four corners of the remote. HOME, which gets you back to the main menu, is all the way at the top. Then there's a similar button called BROWSER in the lower third, another confusing button on the opposite side called RETURN, which gets you back to the menu system. This is in addition to STOP which stops playback and goes back to the menu. MUTE is next to 0 on the number pad instead of grouped with VOL + and VOL -. All the buttons feel and look the same and are inadequately spaced for human thumbs, forcing you to look down at the remote every time, not convenient in a dimly-lit room when a movie is playing.
Inexplicably, the ENTER button doubles as a ZOOM button during playback, yet useless when copying. To mark a file for copying, you have to use not the ENTER button, but the tiny SELECT button in the lower right, grouped together with the DVD playback controls.
Next is the awful firmware update support site. It currently lists 7 separate firmware files, with no revision history, feature/bug fix list, or notes. For that, you have to go to their support forum, which now lists 9 firmwares, with confusing explanations about Bootcode version. You have to figure out which bootcode your device has and download the correct firmware. This is not in the System Info display where it should be. Instead, you have to push STOP and PAUSE simultaneously from the device home page. I don't expect much after-purchase support from companies, but one thing I do demand is painless firmware updates. This is pretty basic and Patriot has managed to failed the test. Google "Patriot Box Office firmware" and see if you can make sense of that page and figure out which firmware you need. ASUS is no prize pig (you can't even find them by googling "ASUS O!Play firmware update"), but at least their firmware section is clearly organized by date and version, with a detailed features/bugfix list for each firmware release. There's no potentially device-bricking "bootcode" to worry about.
I saved the best for last. My unit does not properly power off when I push the POWER button. The TV goes dark and says "No Signal", but all the LEDs on the device are still lit and hard drive still spinning, even when left in this state for several minutes. Pushing POWER again does not boot the system back up. I have to manually flip the switch on the back of the unit every time I want to turn it on or off. I'm not sure if I got a defective unit or if this is normal.
As another example of the unpolished workmanship, the setup menu has a stray white pixel under the menu bar.
SUMMARY:
My rating may improve if Patriot releases a better software update, but as of now, with the latest firmware installed, I cannot in good conscience recommend this product. Home electronics should be easy to use, and with this, it feels like I'm jumping through hoops. I consider myself a gadgets guy and I found this very cumbersome, unintuitive, and difficult to use. Given all these problems, it fares poorly against its main rivals, at any price. It lacks the internet TV capabilities of the comparably-priced O!Play and the YouTube/Pandora/Flickr of the more expensive WD TV Live series. WD TV Live Plus, an upgrade to the regular Live, has Netflix support.
With the exception of the remote, most of this product's problems can be fixed through a firmware update. Patriot just needs to get their act together and hire some usability consultants and address these QA nightmare.
Until they do, get the O!Play instead and plug up an external USB drive.
Lots of features. Wireless element a bit confounding. August 31, 2010
James Anest (Orange County, CA)
I read many of the reviews and did a fair amount of research on these types of items and found this one to be the best "bet". I've had this item about 3 weeks and can say it is doing a very good job.
I still haven't been able to get the wireless to work but I've ordered a wireless N router and adapter for this unit, per suggestions on this site by customers who seem to look like they know what they are saying.
I have to say that the wireless element of this unit is a bit confounding though. I am fairly tech savy and I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out what the set up manual and the on screen prompts actually said. A lot of times, these things are translated from Korean, Chinese or Japanese so you have to kinda' look through what the words say and use creative interpretation (trial and error).
I do like that this unit has two usb inputs. I hooked up an external drive with loaded movies and also put an internal drive into the unit itself for programs that I want to download from my main drive as well as any music I want more accessible. I hope this all works once I get the wireless figured out. I am hopeful.
The video quality is great and the video controls on the remote are very functional. It's a new language for this unit and once you master that, you will be happy with this unit.
If you are a novice at doing these things, I suggest you have someone who is help you or you will pull your hair out. And we don't want that.
Happy tech-ing.
way better than the WD August 14, 2010
jojo
I bought a WD one on May, well, the WD can play most of my stuff, but some of the MKV and TS format can be only displayed image but no sound at all, I'd upgraded all the firmwares but still no hope, until I got this one, now I have no problem at all for all my stuff, I love it .
 Prefer over WD TV Live Plus (so far) August 13, 2010
jzawacki
Just picked on of these and the WD TV Live Plus up and although the WD TV Live Plus has a nicer looking interface, the Patriot Box Office (PBO) seems MUCH better. The interface really is bad, but what is really awesome about this device is the open-ness of it! For example, you can telnet into the box with root access. This allows you to setup manual mounts of a NAS as well as symbolic links to your content. I love the customize-ability of this device! Not only that, but it plays my MythTV server content out of the box! Just click on UPnP and bam, there's the list. Clicking it, and it plays no problems. The WD device connects, but it not able to play anything.
Now, keep in mind that this review is being written by a systems administrator with both Windows and Linux administration knowledge. If you aren't a "techy", I don't know if I would suggest purchasing this device just yet. The interface really is "wonky" as mentioned by other reviewers. But, if you are tech savvy, this is the device to purchase. It does what it really needs to do (play content) extremely well and I have not found anything that it would not play. The WD, on the other hand, has a very polished interface, but I can't really say it's much better. If you like the flashy scrolling and don't mind clicking 10 times to get to your content, you'll probably prefer the WD. Also, the only content that I couldn't play was my MythTV server over UPnP, which I understand might not be an issue for most people.
nice and easy August 11, 2010
J. Zhang (IL, USA)
recognized my AirLink101 AWLL6075 wireless N USB adapter (http://www.amazon.com/AirLink101 AWLL6075 Wireless N Mini USB Adapter. Shows UPNP shares as well as Windows shares (Samba) on my home network. Plays 1080P video by 802.1n wireless connection from the UPNP shares. The same video cannot play smoothly when using Samba share from the same network storage device ( DLink DNS-323 ). Most likely a problem of my storage.
ISO files are not playable when using UPNP shares. Don't know why.
The capability to choose interface language is nice. However, not all items are translated. When I choose Chinese as the interface language, the items in the main menu (Play, Browse, Setup) are still shows as English. Hope that will be fixed in the future firmware updates.
Overall, this a very nice device that comparable to WD TV Live (not the plus one), at attractive price.
Highly recommended.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 62
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